Author Archives: Claire Bateman

“The tongue is in the eye./It speaks through glints and blinks,/Mama after the stroke,/speechless./One blink meant ‘yes,’/two a ‘no.’/I wanted to read her mind/when that gaze overtook her./In the whites of those fixed orbs,/I swore I saw her drown.”—By Vera Gómez Speculative Friction By Claire Bateman GREENVILLE South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—December 2018—As a first-generation child of […]

“I gather stillness in a cold/that hushes all but little sounds—/a woodpecker’s echoless tappings,/leaf-crackle of a jostling squirrel.”—William Thompson Speculative Friction By Claire Bateman   GREENVILLE South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—November 2018— William Thompson’s poems have appeared in numerous journals, including the “Atlanta Review,” the “Saint Katherine Review,” and “Able Muse.” He teaches at Troy University, where […]

“My heart did not break for three decades and then it did and I began to see things from inside out / and the outside lost sheen and dust / Interior worlds, my own hands, tight skin stretched over other tissues, cellular hooks, latticework / hollow wires pulsing cells through carrying pieces of sun to […]

“Here is the dog planet at last where all is running/and sinking, rising and running again—/lessons in flight./To those mad glad beasts/all is cold and holy clouds/and certain sacred sky.”—Ashley Crout Speculative Friction By Claire Bateman GREENVILLE South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—September 2018—Poet Ashley Crout was born in Charleston SC, and graduated from Bard College and the […]

“Any one of these days can be the new first day, Day One, where things seem to be going well. No problem. Any missed understanding can be beginner’s luck, it can be even better than you intended, a kind of innocent perfection. I’ve read a climbing perch can live on land for up to six […]

“The novel I finished reading/last night/in my system like a drug,/a hangover, numbing, dulling,/but for something dark, unseen,/some residue, some fated turn./I have outlived myself,/what now?”—Patricia Waters Speculative Friction By Claire Bateman GREENVILLE South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—June 2018—Patricia Waters was born and reared in Nashville, Tennessee, took her undergraduate degree at what was then Memphis State, […]

“It’s as if our home yearns to satisfy us, although lately dinner’s been perfunctory and the dusting lackluster. In this, we sense our home’s human ambition, its human distraction. Tonight, we will loan it our bad dreams; maybe then it will seek comfort in folding and putting away, in wiping clean the patio doors, in […]

“I soaked up like a sponge/my mother’s Thirties ethic: Throw away/nothing! Yet somehow, out of the blue,/here you are, a spendthrift, prodigal, clean/break with your ancestral line, a brush/with risk and danger.”—Maryann Corbett Speculative Friction By Claire Bateman GREENVILLE South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—March 2018—Poet Maryann Corbett was born in Washington DC, grew up in McLean, Virginia, […]

“We often hear the word quirky applied to contemporary poets (just glance at five random blurbs, you’re sure to find quirky), but perhaps no one writing today inhabits the word quite as fully as Bateman. The premises of her poems are apparently beamed into the atmosphere at a slant from another, logically slippery dimension—yet once […]

“Love is strange and calls me to stranger things/When I was young I thought that I’d know why./I’ve drawn my life—a shape with forty wings.”—Luke Hankins Speculative Friction By Claire Bateman GREENVILLE South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—January 2018—Luke Hankins was born in Natchez, Mississippi in 1984 and grew up in Pineville, Louisiana before moving to his current […]